: We will end this module by tying thematic analysis back to the core concept of critical thinking that frames this entire course. To recap on critical thinking: for you as a postgraduate student, it is like a foundation, or a framework, around which all of your research, reading, analysis and writing should be built.
: Whether you are researching for a literature review piece or interpreting primary data for an original project, it behooves you to have the awareness and ability to adopt a critical perspective – that is, an open, curious, questioning, rigorous and nuanced perspective – in your analysis and reporting. It is not so much about the quantity of data you are able to gather – although, as I pointed out earlier, having a broad range of sources is generally considered a hallmark of rigorous research – but about how you are able to weave together original positions, critiques and counter-critiques to emerge with your own informed position.
: This back-and-forth exchange, juxtaposing different academic positions on a particular issue and forging a new position out of that, is what constitutes the entirety of vibrant academic debate.
: Again, the aim is not to disparage any one position or person, but to expand and enrich our collective understanding of a given topic. It is also worth highlighting that in the critical tradition, thematic analysis follows the constructivist approach, which is an approach to interpreting data that is more nuanced and open than the positivist approach favoured in some branches of social science.
: Many of the critical thinking tenets we shared earlier – starting with open questions rather than closed ones, questioning assumptions, embracing uncertainty and nuance, acknowledging the contingency of science on contextual realities – are brought to bear in doing good, grounded thematic analysis.
: Usually, thematic analysis in the qualitative tradition sets out to understand the topic at hand from the particular perspectives of those being researched, as opposed to offering neat explanations for phenomena that sometimes serve to reinforce those dominant narratives that critical thinking is set up to challenge.
: This way, as a critical thinker doing thematic analysis that is grounded in the context-specific insights emerging from the data, you are able to help construct a broader understanding of the issues you’re exploring in your research. I would like to close with another example of how I used thematic analysis for a previous piece of research, this time for a literature review piece.
: Students who wonder whether and how they can publish review-only papers will benefit from this. This 2014 paper is based entirely on the literature review chapter of my unpublished 2011 PhD thesis. While I was required by peer reviewers to do some more work on the chapter before it was deemed publication-worthy, it is worth noting that the quality that made the chapter lend itself so readily to upgrading was that it employed critical thinking and thematic analysis principles.
: From the start, my PhD was a cross between sociology – specifically, the subfield of science and technology studies – and international development. The core question I was trying to resolve was why several decades of efforts to reduce the reliance of poor households around the world on polluting fuels such as wood and charcoal through improved cooking technologies had met with limited success globally, but especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
: I had spent the first year of the program trawling through the academic and grey literatures on the subject, and there was a lot of it.
: From an international development standpoint, a plethora of multilateral and bilateral actors, as well as national governments, had implemented one improved cookstove intervention after another over the years. These interventions typically responded to global health and climate protection agendas that, while valid in their own right, were often quite disconnected from the needs and priorities of the households at which they were targeted – hence the rather slow uptake of the technologies in question in many local contexts.
: As I went on in my desk research, I began to identify distinct, albeit overlapping, epochs in the seemingly unbroken saga of cookstove development that no one had yet mapped out in the literature.
: So, I set out to do exactly that. Reading through the literature critically and recognising patterns that were informed by the theoretical framework of participatory development (as opposed to expert-led development) that I was simultaneously adopting, I was able to identify and persuasively argue for the existence of three distinct phases of cookstove development as it had been led by external actors up until then.
: In my own words, there had been the context-responsive phase, followed by the expert-led phase, and then finally the market-based phase. Looking at the abstract of the article, one can see the principles we have been talking about in action.
: Quote: The article critically examines the objectives and underlying assumptions of each phase and concludes that, despite the rhetorical shift from an expert-led to a context responsive approach from the 1980s onwards, the priorities and policies and politics of outsider organisations continue to dominate the stove development agenda in the current market-based phase. You may notice how I situated my cookstove story within broader academic discourses in both science and technology studies and international development.
: The persistent divide between lay and expert knowledges has long been problematised in STS, hence the relevance of the expert-led regime I identified in my work to that discourse. Similarly, my insights on the market-based phase of cookstove development fed into long-running debates in international development about the appropriateness or otherwise of market-led mechanisms for distributing public goods – in the case of my work, health and climate protection – in the poor contexts that I was researching.
: So, readers who may not be cookstove researchers or practitioners, but who are interested in these broader issues and discourses will find useful insights to take away from reading this ostensibly niche piece.
: And this is how you get journal editors and reviewers interested in your review manuscript. Of course, this means identifying a suitable journal for your review article in the first place, a topic which we explore in a later module. In any case, applying thematic analysis in your literature review is a good way to get an early start on the method before you even get to the data collection and analysis stages of your research. So, why don’t you go away and start practicing?